The process of removing up to 15 million people from Medicaid, the joint federal-state program that provides health insurance to low-income people, began on April 1, following expiration of the 2020 coronavirus relief package. According to the terms of that package, states received additional federal funding if they guaranteed that Medicaid recipients would keep their health coverage. As a result, the number of recipients of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) soared to 90 million, up from 70 million at the start of the pandemic.
Now that the pandemic emergency is considered to be “over,” those excess recipients will have to be axed. As of April 1, Joe Biden has given states a full year to complete the task of removing 15 million people, but some states are acting to speed up the process, among them Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, New Hampshire, and South Dakota. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is pushing people to “escape the trap of government dependency,” The Hill reports.
